Prisoner of War museum holds captives' stories, spirit
Trudi Hahn, Star Tribune
ANDERSONVILLE, GA. -- Blue specks in the grass turned out to be flowers when I leaned down to see them closely. I had been gazing across a field that during the Civil War was the open-air stockade called Andersonville, a prison whose name some think is synonymous with brutal treatment of wartime captives.
I pressed one knee to the grass and fussed with my camera, trying to focus on the tiny blossoms, then stood.
My knee was wet. Its imprint in the grass was slightly muddy. No longer was it difficult to imagine the placid Georgia scene as home to thousands of muddy and hungry Union soldiers, guarded by soldiers of the Confederate States Army who weren't in much better shape.
Andersonville National Historic Site, now run by the National Park Service, has three sections: the prison field where the stockade once stood, a cemetery still burying veterans and the National Prisoner of War Museum, which serves as a memorial to all U.S. prisoners of war throughout the nation's history.
What happens to men of any nation who are taken prisoner when flags are waving in the smoke of battle can be unbelievably horrid. I speak of men, but the petite uniform of Rhonda Cornum, taken captive at age 36 as an Army major during Gulf War I, stands in a museum case as a reminder that capture knows no gender limits.
In careless hands, the tales of captivity could have been lurid, but this museum is designed to let the resilience of the human spirit shine through.
Veterans' markers
Display cases at the museum are filled with examples of creativity, such as the objects carved from whatever came to Civil War prisoners' idle hands, including a ring fashioned from an animal bone.
During World War II, Americans held by Germans wrote their thoughts in blank books called war logs, which had been sent by U.S. charities. Some are open for viewing. And drawings by Mike McGrath, a retired Navy captain held more than 5? years in North Vietnam, show small details of life in Hanoi's Hoa Lo prison, called the Hanoi Hilton by the Americans. To sketch the original drawings on his cell's walls, he used his own blood and pus from infections and boils.
Gravestone delivery
Andersonville's orientation film, "Echoes of Captivity," uses diaries and sketches to tell visitors what happened to U.S. troops taken captive during 19th-century wars, and for 20th-century wars, oral-history interviews.
Samuel Farrow Sr., an Army enlisted man held almost three years in North Korea, told of his fear after he saw that strips of skin had been sliced off other black prisoners by his captors. James Stockdale, a retired Navy admiral and Medal of Honor recipient held 7? years in North Vietnam, said in the film: "It's part of my identity that I lived like an animal."
Wildflowers
About the only advantage Stockdale had over the long-ago prisoners who churned the spongy soil of Andersonville is that he had a roof over his head. Some canvas tents were available to Union prisoners, but misery was maximum from the prison's opening as Camp Sumter in February 1864 until the war's end.
Nothing of the original camp still stands. The stockade's northeast corner and the north gate have been reconstructed of pine logs similar to the original ones, and slender white posts mark the "deadline" that was a short fence several feet inside the 15-foot stockade barrier. If any prisoner crossed the line, they were shot dead. The largest number of men held at one time within the 26?-acre compound was 32,000.
Clara Barton's influence
Water was scarce, beyond rainwater. A few lucky prisoners who struck water when they dug wells could sell it to others.
Stockade Branch, a narrow creek contaminated by human sewage, flowed through the grounds. But in August 1864, a freshwater spring burst forth during a heavy rainstorm. Named Providence Spring because it seemed sent by divine providence, its cool trickle now is in the shade of the Spring House, built in 1901.
Food and medical care were scarce for prisoners and guards alike, since the South focused its resources on its fighters.
After the war, the camp's commandant, Capt. Henry Wirz, was arrested by the North, tried and hung as a war criminal -- 139 years ago on Nov. 10, 1865. A monument honoring him stands in the middle of the street in Andersonville, the village across the highway that served as the railroad dropoff point for prisoners.
If anyone in the village today believes the trial testimony that said Wirz was crueler to Federal prisoners than he needed to be, they weren't saying so when I visited in March. Southerners tend to wonder why Andersonville bears such a cruel reputation when Northern prisons were also bad.
Notably, in the one at Elmira, N.Y., 24 percent of 12,000 Southern prisoners died. At Andersonville, the comparable figure for deaths is 29 percent of its 45,000 Northern prisoners.
The national cemetery on the grounds is a serene place to think about war, and winners, and what is remembered. It's currently the only active U.S. military cemetery in Georgia; a new one is slated to open in 2005 near Atlanta.
Park-service lore indicates that Clara Barton might have planted the magnolias that tower over the stones. She came to Andersonville in July 1865, a few months after the war's end and the disbanding of the prison. Barton, the founder in 1881 of the American Red Cross, had tried during the fighting to get medical supplies and care for the troops. After the nation was reunited, her charge was to identify and mark the graves of the dead.
Weather-worn stones now stand over the Civil War burial places; in other sections are crisp new gravestones for veterans of more recent wars.
Looking at a fresh stone for a Vietnam veteran, I remembered a conversation I had in the fall of 2003 with Ed Hubbard, a retired Air Force colonel who was held a prisoner of war in North Vietnam for more than 6? years, much of it in Hoa Lo.
Half a world away from Andersonville, a portion of that prison is now a museum honoring prisoners, but it is meant to honor Vietnamese tortured there by French colonizers before they left the country in the 1950s. North Vietnam started adding U.S. military personnel in the 1960s.
Hubbard had toured the Vietnamese museum on Feb. 12, 2003, the 30th anniversary of the date when the first batch of released U.S. POWs were flown out of Hanoi.
On his visit, he told me, he tagged along with a tour group that turned out to be mostly U.S. Navy people and their spouses.
A young Vietnamese guide, perhaps in his early 20s, was reading a tour script in English from a piece of paper. When they reached the few rooms noting the American captives, the guide pointed out a sign that said, "Though having committed untold crimes upon our people, but no American pilots suffered revenge once they were captured and detained."
Hubbard emphatically disagreed. When the Navy folks turned around and asked what he knew about it, he started talking about what it was like to exist within those grim rooms.
"The most fascinating thing was, the little Vietnamese guy came over," Hubbard told me.
The tour guide said to Hubbard, "Would you tell them what really happened here? I know nothing. I am told to read this."
The truth about what happened at the Hanoi Hilton or Andersonville, or any wartime prison camp run by any country, can never be fully understood by anyone who didn't live it. But Andersonville National Historic Site, in the words of its brochure, does its best to help visitors understand the loss of freedom experienced by prisoners of war, so that visitors are able "to cherish freedom all the more."
Trudi Hahn is at thahn@startribune.com.
© 2004 Star Tribune